Western Digital will launch a 20TB hard drive using OptiNAND technology
2 min readWestern Digital will launch a 20TB hard drive using OptiNAND technology
Western Digital will launch a 20TB hard drive using OptiNAND technology, which can improve capacity, performance and reliability.
In November last year, Seagate began to provide data centers with 20TB hard drives using heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology.
In addition, Seagate is developing a variety of consumer hard drives with a capacity of 20TB, which will use perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technologies.
It is expected that hard drives using SMR/PMR+Mach.2 technology will be available this year. When listed in the second half of the year, there will be a higher price/performance ratio.
As a competitor of Seagate, Western Digital is not idle on HDD. According to Anandtech reported that , during a recent event organized by the HDD Reimagine, Western Digital will introduce the latest OptiNAND architecture, so special is the integration iNAND embedded flash drive on universal PCB.
Western Digital said that the OptiNAND architecture is different from the previous hybrid architecture hard drive (SSHD) and is an innovative architecture. Unlike SSHD, the flash memory in the OptiNAND architecture is not used as a cache. It does not store user data during normal operation, but instead stores metadata about hard disk operations.
Through a series of technical combinations, hard disk capacity can be effectively increased, and performance and reliability can be improved.
This 20TB hard drive is based on the OptiNAND+ePMR solution and consists of 9 discs with a single disc capacity of 2.2TB.
It uses a tertiary drive to improve the positioning accuracy of the head on the track, and uses a 3D TLC NAND (unknown capacity) The flash drive is controlled by a customized main control chip.
Western Digital plans to introduce the OptiNAND architecture to all hard drives of 20TB or above, and eventually increase the capacity to 50TB.
Western Digital did not provide specific read and write data for the time being, but emphasized that the addition of iNAND embedded general-purpose flash drives can improve the performance of hard disk burst random read and write.
Western Digital said that 20TB hard drives based on the OptiNAND+ePMR solution will be delivered as early as the end of the year. Obviously, the first batch of customers are from the data center.
